Mage Knight: ApocalypseReview

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Dungeon crawling at its most average.

By Charles Onyett

With all Mage Knight: Apocalypse's features, it initially seemed like it would be pretty good. Essentially a Diablo clone in 3D, the game has all the aspects that made Blizzard's two games entertaining. You get five character classes to choose from, each with three skill trees and lots of varying abilities. There are plenty of items to collect, including special rare ones. Encounters with gigantic bosses are in place, there's a good camera system that lets you keep the action in view. Despite all that, we were generally bored with the experience.

The playable cast of Janos the Dwarf, Tal the Elf, Kithana the Nightblade, Sarus the Draconum, or Chela the Amazon, are all Oathsworn. They've pledged allegiance to a Solonavi named Sylvathis who eventually charges them with the task of recovering five Aspects of Apocalypse scattered around the world. Getting all five in one place will foil the Landshatter Prophecies whereby a giant Landshatter Dragon breaks apart the Earth with the help of an evil power-crazed magician called Katalkus.

To get to each Aspect, you'll need to kill a whole lot of baddies. Each dungeon map in the game has an very linear layout. Moving from start to finish will require the slaying of all the enemies standing around, which are all apparently waiting for you. Occasionally there are extremely light puzzle elements, like the energy spire power-downs near the start and end of the game, or the switches when recovering an Atlantean Skiff. Instead of giving you experience for kills, actions level up a character's individual statistics. For instance, using a lot of magic spells seemed to give us more Wisdom (more mana) and Intelligence (faster mana regen). Entering melee combat will instead level up Strength (stronger attacks) and Stamina (more health).

Skills function in somewhat the same way. As each is used, it accumulates individual experience. Eventually it levels up. Depending on what your statistics are, a new skill in one of three trees may be unlocked. By mousing over the icons of still-locked skills you can see what you need to do to make them available. During one single-player playthrough we were able to reach the end of only one skill tree. This means there's plenty of room to further expand your character's abilities by either playing through the single-player campaign again or going online and playing cooperatively.

Sounds pretty good, right? Unfortunately the rest of Mage Knight doesn't manage to remain interesting enough to warrant more playthroughs. To begin, the storyline isn't executed very well. The frequent cut scenes never deliver any kind of engaging dialogue and are further hampered by voice acting that sways from average to terrible. Chela the Amazon, for instance, sounds like she's reading a lecture for an English as a foreign language class. Janos isn't much better. Kithana, on the other hand, has a natural flow to her speech, but amongst such awful co-stars it doesn't really matter. While the storyline could have been passably interesting, poorly structured dialogue and bad voice acting prevent it from excelling.

Regardless of which character you picked to start the game, they'll all end up in the party by the end. Though you'll be the only one directly controllable, there are some limited party control commands like attack, follow, and stop. You'll quickly come to realize how useless these commands are. Party members in this game get lost constantly. Over the course of a stage, your squad will get split up or stuck behind a wall, a pillar, or their own clumsy feet, leaving you to fight alone. We tried on numerous occasions to go back and retrieve our allies to little effect. Many times, even as we were standing directly with no obstacles between us and slamming the follow button, they wouldn't budge.

As a more roundabout solution, if you can get your allies killed they can be revived at any of the game's numerous save points. When you die you'll also automatically respawn at the save point. This initially proves to be convenient but later reveals itself as a device that removes nearly all the challenge from the game. Let's say you're at a boss encounter or a fight with a particularly nasty group of monsters. They kill you. You respawn at a nearby save point with any squadmates that happened to go down and all your armor, weapons, and statistics intact, then run back to the conflict. As it turns out, absolutely nothing has been reset, so you just continue the fight. Rinse and repeat until you win. Another strange design element is that bosses seem to regenerate their health extremely slowly, so death is in no way detrimental to your battle. Just run back to them after you die, then keep hammering away. Only on the end boss (who has a super-cheap instant-kill blast) did we have an issue with this, since he regenerated rather quickly. By drawing him near a save point, we solved the problem.